Track your team's short-term and long-term goals with this Team Objectives and Tasks template. Use the Tasks sheet to record individual tasks, assign them to owners, and track their progress and due dates.
With Related rows, link each task to its corresponding objective in the Objectives sheet and the responsible team in the Teams sheet. Now you know who is handling each short-term task, and the long-term objective that it's working towards.
If you want to see what's going well and what's being dragged along behind a horse, use one of the built-in Kanban views to break tasks down by status and progress.
You're probably familiar with a task list, which is a list of things that someone has to do. A team objectives list is similar, except the "someone" is expanded to various teams, and every task is tied to a specific long-term objective that you are trying to achieve. In most other ways, it's very similar to a task list template, with a list of what needs to be done, who is going to do it, and how it's progressing.
The advantage of a team objectives list is that it gives you a more contextualized overview of not just what you're doing, but also why you're doing it. Note that this only applies to items on the list; it can't tell you why you just went to look at Facebook again even though there was nothing worthwhile there when you looked five minutes ago. That's on you. But for tasks you assign to other teams, linking each task to a bigger objective helps keep everyone on the same page.
97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. On the other hand, if your team's alignment is Chaotic Evil, that's bound to impact your project as well.
Fewer than 6% of all companies communicate their goals and objectives daily. Using a team objectives list helps put you in the elite 6% of internal company communications. For comparison, that would be like being the Rhode Island, Delaware, or Connecticut of being a small state.
Similar to a google sheets task list template, this spreadsheet allows you to enter each Task that you need completed in a separate row. Assign each task a Lead to oversee it, a Due Date, and select a Progress and Status to track whether the task is going well or throwing up red warning lights.
Attachments may be added directly into the spreadsheet when relevant, or a Notes column is provided to add additional information.
Each task is linked with a specific larger Objective, as well as a Team responsible for handling it. Objectives and Teams each have their own worksheet, which displays all linked Tasks. The Teams worksheet also includes the Lead and Team Members for each team, making it easy to see exactly who is working on each task.
Advanced view options allow a more complete overview of all tasks. Kanban Views on the left-hand side allow sorting of tasks into columns by status and progress, to zero in on tasks that need extra attention.
An automatically generated pie chart and bar graph at the top of the Tasks worksheet offer a quick overview of all tasks by Status and Team, so you can see whether most of your tasks are progressing according to plan, and whether one team may have too much work on their plate.
For the forest.
Sure, using a free online spreadsheet like this one is better for the environment than printing up endless papers, but the biggest advantage of a team objectives list is that it clearly links every short-term task to a longer-term objective. It's easy to become hyper-focused on completing task after task while losing sight of the larger goals that everything should be in service of. In other words, many companies have the problem where they "can't see the forest for the trees", because they're so busy handling tasks, they never stop to consider the bigger picture.
This spreadsheet template lets you see the forest.
Too often, we end up confusing what is urgent with what is important. Urgent tasks have an approaching deadline, and as responsible business people, we don't want to miss a deadline. So we focus our efforts on meeting the deadline, and we do. And then there are other urgent deadlines, so we focus our efforts to meet those, and we do again. Well done, us.
But by constantly focusing on what is urgent, the overarching goals of an organization can be forgotten, or put on the back burner. Before you know it, a month is gone and you've met 27 deadlines but haven't actually done anything to forward that big conceptual goal had meant to work on.
By including an objectives list, this task template lets you list out your important objectives and make sure that you're not forgetting any of them. And by linking each task to an objective, you can not only see the importance of each task as you're working on it, but quickly identify any objectives that don't have tasks in progress. So you won't just be meeting deadlines, but doing so with purpose.
Companies that want to increase employee buy-in
If your employees understand what role their work plays in the larger company strategy, they're more likely to appreciate the importance of their job -- even when the tasks of that job may not be particularly exciting.
Companies with a need for long-term planning
If you're trying to grow your business with ambitious goals, then your goals probably aren't simple enough to be accomplished with a single task. Track your long-term goals on the objectives worksheet, and keep tabs on the status of the relevant tasks.
Companies with multiple teams
When your organization is juggling five different teams, it becomes especially important to make sure everyone is on the same page. This spreadsheet literally provides that page.
